Zoologist tracks down rare fairy shrimp

Published 1:00 am, Friday, July 11, 2008

It's a detective story, complete with hints and clues that lead nowhere, a crucial phone call, and the elementary moment when the facts align and you know the prize is in your hands.

The stuff that dreams are made of, in
Eric Lazo-Wasem
's casebook, is a rare species of fairy shrimp, Eubranchipus holmanii -- a creature not seen in the state for a half-century.

"I looked at it and at first I thought, I can't believe it," Lazo-Wasem, of Redding, said. "The next morning, I was pulling people from the hallways into our lab to look at it."

Lazo-Wasem is the senior collection manager for invertebrate zoology at the
Peabody Museum of Natural History
in New Haven. At his post there, he's seen a fair number of fairy shrimp -- freshwater crustaceans that show up in vernal pools every spring.

"They're not rare," he said.

But those shrimp were all Eubranchipus vernalis -- the common species in the state. Lazo-Wasem had his eye on a bigger prize, shrimp-wise.

In old field guides, Lazo-Wasem found mention of the holmanii species in Connecticut. But none of the field guides said exactly where it might be found.

"It could have been anywhere," he said.

Some sleuthing led Lazo-Wasem to a scientific paper written by
Dorothy Richardson
, saying she'd found the holmanii shrimp in the New London area. But Richardson wrote the paper in the 1950s.

Given the fate of many of the state's vernal pools, which have been ruined by development when they haven't been paved over, the odds of finding Richardson, or the pool, seemed slim.

Askins knew Dorothy Richardson, who had been chairman of the college's biology department in the 1940s.

"I knew her after she retired," Askins said. "She was still active in the department."

Askins also knew
Bernice Wheeler
, another biology professor, who would collect fairy shrimp at a vernal pool in Groton for her classes.

"When Eric asked me, I knew exactly what he was talking about," said Askins, one of the state's most respected ornithologists. "I've seen the fairy shrimp from that pool. I thought they were common."

The chase now jumps ahead a couple of years, when Lazo-Wasem and his assistant,
Daniel Drew
, were driving into New Haven.

"Dan turned to me and said, 'We've got to go out into the field today.' I said, 'OK, let's go find that pool in Groton,'" Lazo-Wasem said. "To be honest, I wasn't even expecting to find the pool or fairy shrimp in the pool. I certainly wasn't expecting to find the rare species."

But Drew and Lazo-Wasem found the pool, protected by open space. They found shrimp and brought about 30 specimens back with them to the Peabody.

Lazo-Wasem looked at some, saw the common species, and thought no more about it. But at the urging of a graduate student, he took a second look, late in the day, and his eye caught what it first missed -- a small shrimp with a front appendage like an elephant's trunk.

"Some of these species have very slight differences," Lazo-Wasem said. "In this case, the differences just hit you on the head."

The holmanii fairy shrimp Lazo-Wasem found are now part of the Peabody's vast collection of invertebrates. As a member of the state's
Endangered Species Review Committee
, he's also nominated it for inclusion on the state's endangered species list, due to be revised in 2009.

But triumphs fade. The chase goes on. There's the clam shrimp, Eulimnadia agassizzii -- described in the 1920s, re-discovered in the New London area in the 1970s, and incognito since then.

"From my work with clam shrimp in the Caribbean, I know they can survive in very small pools of water," Lazo-Wasem said. "I've got people looking for them for me, and we've come tantalizingly close.